BY Julia Robson |
06 July 2011

This morning Paris awoke to vast billboards in the streets and Metro, featuring the world's top model, 27-year-old
Anja Rubik
, wearing a billowing gold chiffon Elie Saab dress photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Tonight, Elie Saab, who showed his haute couture show today, will launch his first perfume at a lavish party in the aptly named, Hotel de la Monnaie.

Couture is perhaps the one time money is allowed to be the main focus of things in fashion. It is the dream sequence within the fashion season which is otherwise occupied with the graft of flogging coats, jackets, shoes and ultimately, make-up and perfume.

Couture shows are an occasion for the designer to let rip and this is exactly what Jean Paul Gaultier did today with a collection, loosely referencing ballet, that featured Gaultier signatures, from military parkas and pin-striped androgynous suits, to vast net tutus worn with clumpy boots, reworked in luxury fabrics.

This season his couture collection featured 50 per cent menswear, a ploy to flag up the fact he too is launching a new men's fragrance, called
Kokorico
, (the French way of saying cock a doodle do).

If successful this could mirror the success of
Le Male
, his best-selling men's fragrance which stayed at the number one spot in men's toiletries for a staggering ten years before being beaten off by Paco Rabanne's flashy,
1 million
- the one with the annoying advert where the man snaps his fingers and gets a pretty girl that is always used in X Factor breaks - last year. Get ready for the
Kokorico
advert; here a macho male flamenco dancer wearing a black suit, partly covered in cockerel feathers dancers about - very footballer's stag night.

Gaultier's
Le Classique
women's perfume, which comes in a glass bottle shaped like a ladies' torso, is currently at No 6 in the perfume charts.

Perfume sales are not just a lucrative sideline to couture, which reaps a negligible amount; they are vital to the health and indeed existence of a fashion superbrand.

A fragrance house, such as French beauty fashion giant, Beaute Prestige International (BPI), buys the license or name of the designer (along with Gaultier they own Issey Miyake and Narciso Rodriguez), then pays royalties to the designer. Because many more billions of bottles of perfume are sold than haute couture gowns - which cost upwards of £40,000 - you start to see why the two must work hand in hand.

"Designers are involved in every step of creating their fragrance," Daniel Chastenet, European manager of the group explained at the launch and unveiling of the
Kokorico
bottle following the Gaultier show, which featured scantily clad women banging drums standing alongside models who had moments before stepped off the catwalk. "It is aimed at a young energetic man who is flamboyant, loves fashion and isn't scared of anything." Very like its designer then.

"Nothing goes out without the approval of the designer," Chastenet went on, "it is the essence of what they are about after all."